Quantum wire and quantum dot semiconductor lasers

Abstract

There is currently great interest in fabrication of structures that are two and three dimensional analogs of the conventional quantum well. We review here the physics behind the use of arrays of such lower dimensional structures in semiconductor laser active layers.Methods which are currently under investigation for producing such structures will be discussed.Q uantum wires and quantum dots are two and three dimensional analogs of the conventional quantum well (see Figure 1). A quantum dot, for example, would confine an electron in three dimensions to a size comparable to the de Broglie wavelength of the electron in the crystal. To be useful in a device, arrays of quantum wires and quantum dots must be considered as illustrated in Fig. 1. In such arrays quantum dots and wires composed of a low bandgap material would be imbedded in a higher bandgap host (e.g., GaAs dots in an AlGaAs host). A potentially important application of these structures is to laser diodes.' In such devices, the conventional bulk active layer is replaced with an array of quantum dots or quantum wires. As discussed below, these devices would have many advantages over conventional devices.The most important property of quantum wires and quantum dots as concerns their application to laser diode active layers is their density of states functions. Idealized versions of these functions are presented in Fig. 2 for bulk, conventional quantum well, quantum wire, and quantum dot active layers. In reducing dimension it is apparent that these functions take on more singular behavior. For the quantum dot, the behavior is analogous to the density of states of an atomic system. This narrowing of the density of states function carries over directly into the optical gain spectrum, which, for k-conserving transitions, is proportional to the effective density of states of the electronic system and the Fermi t